Supporting physics teaching with research-based resources

These quick tips from the Faculty Teaching Institute can be used to improve grading in your classes. These practices for grading policies express high standards while helping all students succeed. Note that many of these have the additional benefit of reducing students’ stress and desperation, thus reducing cheating.

Use clear, compassionate grading policies so the standards are clear, help students to learn and grow, and give space for students to have a bad day without overpenalizing them. Grade formative assessment for participation only.

Use frequent low-stakes quizzes, not small N high-stakes exams. Don’t rely on just a few exams to determine a grade; high-stakes exams disadvantage students. Instead, multiple quizzes (e.g., weekly or biweekly) ensure students put in consistent effort and give them low-consequences chances to practice before demonstrating their final level of mastery. Increasing the frequency of assessments automatically reduces the stakes for each one. Fewer high-stakes exams also puts heavy pressure on students which can increase the temptation to cheat.

Use 3-2-1 or another coarse-grain grading scheme. When your grading scheme is too fine-grained (e.g. one point for each part of a problem), it takes you longer and provides less useful feedback for students. On homework and quizzes especially, consider a 0-1-2 scale (0 = does not meet the standard, 1 = meets the standard, 2 = exceeds the standard). Another approach is “meets standard” and “not yet.”

Allow students to revise and resubmit. Especially on homework or formative assessments, this “mastery approach” allows students to continue to improve their work until they meet the desired standard. This will set them up well for success on exams and hold them accountable for paying attention to corrective feedback.

Allow “oops” tokens for late work or to redo an assignment. For example, each student might be given 3 “oops'' tokens to use during the term. Importantly, students do not need to disclose the reason behind their use of the “oops” token, allowing them privacy.

Use a regrade form for students to request a re-grading of a high-stakes assessment. A re-grade sheet gives a standardized way for students to make this request for you to manage on your own time (not in office hours). Examples are online, and the Gradescope site also includes such options.

Additional practices:

• Use minimum grading scales to avoid overly penalizing low scores. In a “minimum grading scale” the instructor does not give percentage grades that are below 50%. Any grade below 65% is still considered a failing grade, but by capping the minimum grade at 50%, students are more likely to be able to recover from a single very low score in the term. Poor performance on exams (including leaving blanks) are affected by individual characteristics such as race, gender, and first-generation college student status; thus minimum grading scales are more equitable.
• Review troublesome items. When grading an exam, do a quick look to see what percentage of students missed each item and if there was a consistent reason for a large fraction of the class missing an item. Then adjust the score for any poorly worded questions and let students know that this was done. This establishes greater trust between instructor and student.
• Use rubrics to reduce grading bias. A rubric identifies different levels of performance criteria. A rubric can be useful for grading problems, essays, projects, presentations, or other types of open-ended work. These can be useful to provide to students in advance, but research suggests it’s most useful to show the top (exemplary) level of the rubric.
• Use comments or comment codes. Write feedback on papers or problem sets as possible. You might develop a code for common comments to save writing them down.
• Communicate clearly about success criteria by outlining what the criteria are, giving multiple examples of exemplary work, and spending class time discussing pieces of work that do and don’t meet those standards. Again, showing the top level of the rubric can be beneficial.
• Avoid grading homework by hand. Use other mechanisms to give students feedback on their work such as posting solutions, allowing students to revise and resubmit, having students review one another's work (peer review), or auto-grading. Research shows that students ignore written feedback when it’s accompanied by a grade. If you are writing feedback for students, consider not assigning a letter grade on that assignment.
• Learn about alternative grading or “ungrading” paradigms where students reflect on their learning and give themselves their own grade. Consider what feels aligned with your values and fits within the constraints at your institution.

This Expert Recommendation is based in part on W. McKeachie & M. Svinicki,  McKeachie’s Teaching Tips (Cengage Learning, 2014), K. Hogan & V. Sathy, Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for promoting equity in the classroom (West Virginia University Press, 2022), and C.A. Paul & D. J. Webb, Percent grade scale amplifies racial or ethnic inequities in introductory physics, Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 18, (2022).

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grants DUE-2141678, 2141745, 2141769, 2141795, and 2142045.  Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.